LCD Backl ighting has generated widespread interest from many diverse disciplines within the engineering industry. This has no doubt been fueled by the trend to portability and particularly to the enormous growth of the computing market. Products such as notebook, laptop, and palmtop personal computers, portable televisions, viewcams, point of sale terminals, automotive dashboards, avionics displays, metering and instrumentation usually employ an LCD screen, and as such require a means of backlighting.

To date the most prevalent method has been to use a small cold cathode fluorescent (CCFL) tube that is usually integrated with a reflector/diffuser into the display unit. The CCFL power consumpt ion can account for a significant portion (up to 50%) of the total system requirement. Therefore to achieve marketable advantages in battery life and re-charge frequency, much attention must be applied to the CCFL power supply, so as to attain the highest possible conversion efficiency.

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